INESSENTIAL WRITINGS: SHAUGHNESSY'S LEGACY IN A SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE

<p>This article offers a rhetorical analysis of the charges that have been waged against Mina Shaughnessy's scholarship from poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist quarters. While arguing that the philosophical and political interventions such work has furnished are crucial, Gray-Rosendale contends that too often Shaughnessy's research has been somewhat mischaracterized. First, the paper investigates the contradictory terminological investments within the charges against Shaughnessy (i.e., "essentialism," "accommodationism," and lack of "materialist praxis"). Second, through close readings of Shaughnessy's texts, the paper maintains that the complexity and "self-difference" of Shaughnessy's own scholarship and its historical-political context indeed undermine such criticisms.</p>